Consumer products are often sold in multi-unit bundles. Common examples include two or more bars of soap, tubes of toothpaste, cartons of facial tissue, or flexible pouches of moist wipes. Various techniques exist to bundle the units together for sale, including a plastic film bag or overwrap, a cardboard box, and gluing the items together. These conventional methods in many instances suffer from deficiencies. For example, if it were desired to sell multiple units of a moist wipes flexible dispensing pouch with a rigid flip-open lid (representatively illustrated in FIG. 1), the above-listed techniques present various problems. Beginning with a stack of two wipes pouch units, wrapping the stack with a plastic film overwrap—and nothing more—will bundle the units, but the resulting bundle stack will lack consistently flat surfaces, making stacking for storage or retail display challenging and unsightly. A cardboard box would provide a consistently flat surface for stacking the stack, but cardboard is opaque and would conceal useful graphics which may be printed on the individual units, and a cardboard box encasing the individual units may be costly and wasteful. Finally, gluing the individual units together would in this case be impeded by the presence of the rigid flip-open lid, because the bottom surface of the pouch unit on top of the stack would sit atop the rigid flip-open lid of the pouch unit on the bottom of the stack.
What is needed is an improved method of bundling stacked consumer products that does not completely conceal the graphics of the individual product packaging, that provides sufficient shape and integrity to the bundle to enhance stacking and/or retail presentation, that is more cost-effective than a conventional corrugate or cardstock box, and that makes relatively sparing use of packaging raw material.